The Price of Scotland by Douglas Watt sampler

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Price of Scotland B format_Layout 1 03/11/2020 11:09 Page 10 10 the price of scotland By June the English government had precise intelligence about the Company’s plans, although the Scots were in fact having second thoughts at this point. An English commission for ‘promoting trade and inspecting and improving Plantations’ called Dampier and Wafer to attend ‘to enquire of them the state of the Country upon the Isthmus of Darien where signified Scotch East India Comp have a design to make a settlement’. 31 On 2 July Dampier and Wafer were questioned and on 10 September it was recommended that an expedition be sent from London or Jamaica to take possession of the area for England. Captain Richard Long, who had offered his services to salvage wrecks off the north coast of Darien, was provided with a commission and a ship, the Rupert prize, and set sail for the isthmus on 5 December 1697. 32 The English government therefore had a clear idea where the Scots were heading before the Company of Scotland had come to a definite conclusion about their destination. The efforts of the directors to maintain secrecy had been a waste of time. It was well known in merchant circles that Paterson had been peddling the plan for years. Don Francisco Antonio Navarro, the Spanish Resident in Hamburg, was informing the Spanish crown of Scottish designs on Darien from July 1697. 33 But while the English and Spanish knew where the Scottish expedition was sailing, some of the Scots who left on the first voyage in the summer of 1698 were not so clear about their destination. Ensign William Campbell of Tullich believed he was heading for Africa. 34 Thus, under the influence of William Paterson, a Scottish jointstock company decided to establish a colony in a vital area of the Spanish empire. This was an ambitious and, as it turned out, foolhardy decision, but other small European nations were looking for colonial crumbs in the Caribbean at the same time. What gave the Darien project its particular importance was the large number of Scots who invested in the Company, not just merchants from Edinburgh and Glasgow, but many nobles, and a large number of lairds, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, craftsmen and ministers. There was also a significant number of female investors; nobles, widows and the daughters of 31 Ibid., 48–9. 32 Gallup-Diaz, Door of the Seas, 87–9. 33 Ibid., 82–3. One letter from Navarro reported that the Scots also had designs on Chile and an island in the Straits of Magellan. 34 National Archives of Scotland [nas], Breadalbane Muniments, gd 112/ 64/14/21.
Price of Scotland B format_Layout 1 03/11/2020 11:09 Page 11 the strange dream of william paterson 11 lairds and merchants. Success or failure would impact a relatively large part of the Scottish political nation. The capital that was raised gave the directors of a Scottish company, for the first time, immense financial muscle. For a few months they were in a much stronger position than the Scottish government, which had significant problems raising revenue in the later 17th century. Briefly the Company became a ‘state within a state’. What they did with their cash would therefore have considerable political as well as financial implications.
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